*Coogan and Brydon. Photograph courtesy of Tribeca Film Festival.*This year the funniest, most endearing film at the Tribeca Film Festival has been Michael Winterbottom’s meta buddy road comedy, The Trip, which opens this June in America. Adapted from the BBC series of the same name, British comedians Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon star as slightly fictionalized versions of themselves, thrown together on a romantic tour of England’s poetic north country after Coogan’s girlfriend decamps for the states. Feeling lonely and more than a bit neurotic about his career, Coogan begrudgingly asks the happily married Brydon along in her stead, and the result is one of the best comic odd couplings since Matthau and Lemon went mano a mano in a Riverside Drive apartment. Little Gold Men sat down with the pair in the basement bar of the Smyth Tribeca, only to watch our interview be derailed as Brydon rolled his eyes at Coogan’s long, serious monologues, and Coogan arched a skeptical eyebrow at Brydon’s cheeky over-agreeability. The remnants of the discussion are below.
John Lopez: Do you really hate Rob’s impressions that much?
Steve Coogan: I’ll be honest, Rob’s very funny but Rob’s banter is more entertaining to me than hearing him do a reasonably accurate Al Pacino. I can do that stuff as well, but I never really understood why other people enjoy them. It’s like watching a juggler to me—it’s a very impressive trick, but some guy going, “Listen to me do all these funny voices,” is meaningless.

Rob Brydon: You used to do that, didn’t you?

Coogan: But what I tried to do is integrate it into conceits that have a point. Ronnie Colman in Vietnam was making a serious point.

Brydon: [Guffaws] You’re so full of shit.

Coogan: Yes—but I wanted to do imitations that weren’t just doing the silly voice.

Brydon: I’m the same way—when I do my live show, I do Al Pacino reading The Gruffalo. In my defense, which I think is needed at this point, it’s something we did in the show, but I don’t go around doing it all the time.

[Coogan flashes a wicked smile.]

Was all this improv?

Coogan: We’ll talk about what we’re going to improvise, and the various beats that will work. We might talk about the comic rhythm—if you interrupt me here, maybe I can say this and that will be funny. But generally we don’t quite know what we’re going to say until the cameras roll. There’s the synopsis. Like, we knew I was going to sleep with the photographer in one episode. And the contrivances are motivated by things that have truth in them. We take aspects of those and crank up the volume to make them sing more, and make them more visceral, more palpable.

[Brydon winks surreptitiously at Coogan’s serious, lengthy analysis.]

Sometimes it feels like you guys are playing a game of comic chicken with each other’s insecurities and neuroses.

Coogan: There’s a bit of that. A bit of driving towards each other to see who’s going to swerve.

Brydon: But not in real life.

Coogan: No, we don’t do that in real life, but we gave license to each other to do that, because that tension and that conflict stops it from being two self-satisfied, vaguely affable friends, which is sort of nauseating. It’s the discomfort and the sharpness—the uncomfortable truths that give it some sort of weight.

Brydon: We know which parts of our own personalities to push forward and which to pull back so it becomes a convincing relationship on-screen. . . . It’s like tennis.

Coogan: I prefer fencing.

Brydon: He likes fencing. I say tennis. It’s basically a sport, and if the other player’s good

Coogan: I prefer fencing because if you take the tips off you can kill somebody.

Brydon: The other day you said it was like playing tennis with swords.

Coogan: I’d say tennis is fencing with racquets.

Brydon: “Tennis is fencing with racquets”?! What are you talking about? We should never have brought the swords up.

Do either of you fence?

Coogan: I do. Foil and saber.

Brydon: Really?

Coogan: Yes, at drama school.

Brydon: We didn’t do that at my drama school.

Coogan: I was taught by an Olympic fencer.

Brydon: Well, bully for you.

Coogan: I could parry and thrust.

Brydon: [Smirking] Well there’s more to you than meets the eye. Tennis is my thing.

Coogan: I might take up tennis quickly before I get too old.

Brydon: Well, you’ve got to have good technique, otherwise you just get in your way.